


When all beauty is destroyed

by phrynne



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Depression, Emotional Hurt, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Falling In Love, First Kiss, Getting Together, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Not Epilogue Compliant, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-08
Updated: 2018-04-08
Packaged: 2019-04-19 22:33:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 19
Words: 2,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14247153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phrynne/pseuds/phrynne
Summary: When all beauty is destroyed, he’s the only thing my eyes settle on.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Well, I thought I was done with them... turns out I had one more story to tell.

When all beauty is destroyed, he’s the only thing my eyes settle on. 

 

I’m shards and ropes in the midst of all chaos. I fall to my knees, a silent drum in my ears. I look up. Between ruins, he stands. I wait for judgement. There’s only his hand outstretched. Smudged, scratched, dirtied. His wand hand, the hand that saved us. Everything’s blurry and grey. He’s a ghost, the floor feels too close, and then I expect blackness, rest, the end. 

I don’t expect him. 

His hands holding me up. 

The scent of war and blood and loss and him. I don’t expect him to speak: I’m sorry they’re dead, he says.

His voice is hollowed from the inside. His hand is on my face.

I shake. His words hold all the power of truth. If it were anyone else, I’d deny them. But I know he never tells lies.

I want to ask him why his hand is wet, but I don’t. Time twists, bends, escapes my notice. 

My world is dust and broken things. His hand guides me away.


	2. Chapter 2

I take notice of time by counting the lines on his face. There are more of them each time. On his brow. On the corner of his mouth. 

Among the living, it’s his face I come to know best. 

I remember all the dead faces. My mother’s blue eyes. Blue is the color of loss. My father’s hands, wandless, lifeless. So much like mine. 

The night before the trial he comes to see me twice. There’s a new line on his forehead, next to the scar. I reach out my hand, my words come forth without any decision on my part: 

It’ll be okay, I tell him. I don’t know what okay is, so it tastes familiar like a lie. 

He lifts up his eyes. I used to think they were green, but they’re dark. His jaw is set.

It has to be, he says. 

I smile, not knowing what he is talking about, not knowing any future but this.


	3. Chapter 3

I stand at my own trial like I’m attending someone else’s life. The defendant is a thin white man, grey clothes like rags hanging about him, blond-white lifeless hair. His hands are bound by an Incarcerous, but as I watch him I realise how unnecessary the binding is. That man is not going anywhere. He’s accepted the guilt. He wants to pay. He has no reason to live. I like to think of him as a specter. Incorporeal, unreal. 

But what to say about the other one?

Because he’s there. Solid. He sits, and watches, and scribbles fast on a small notebook. He looks up and the lights of the Wizengamot catch on the rim of his glasses. There’s a pause, like a deep breath. He stands. He flexes his hand. He looks at his scribbled lines. He speaks.

He’s articulate. Exact. Determined. Only his hand trembles. I don’t know what he says, but they all listen. 

All but the specter. 

When they unlock the spell tying his arms he looks lost. 

You’re free to go, they say.

You’re free to go, they repeat.

You’re free, aren’t you listening?

He doesn’t know the meaning of the words.


	4. Chapter 4

Turns out, you’re free to go, meant the Manor. 

The house is a monstrous living thing, my inheritance. When they leave me at the gates, I throw up. I stare at the bare contents of my stomach, the stain darkening the grounds, sinking into the earth. I want to follow it. I want to be dust. 

My hand pushes the gate. It makes a sound like my bones breaking.


	5. Chapter 5

For days on end I sit at the Manor’s library, alone. I don’t read. Don’t sleep. 

Trays of food come and go back untouched. The House elves look at me with eyes wide, pleading. I tell them they’re free to go, free to go, I repeat, they don’t leave. 

I stare at the mark in my arm. It’s a shadow of what it was, veins of white etched in my skin, reminding me of the choice, reminding me my life wasn’t mine. In the end, darkness has won. My mind is blank. Gone.    



	6. Chapter 6

There’s no reason today should be any different, but a knock on the door tells me it is so. 

Mr. Harry Potter is here to see you, Sir, someone says and I take a while to understand she means me. And  _ him _ . 

I’m staring at a dark stain on the wall when he walks in. 

I’m sorry to bother you, he says. 

A sound escapes my lips and I double over, my body wrecked in a spasm. My eyes water. It smoothes my vision of him standing in my library. 

I wonder how long it has been. I count the lines. One, two, three, four, I lose count. Too long, then. He looks years older. So this is what the War has done to the hero. 

He walks over to where I’m sitting. He doesn’t seem bothered by the stale air, the near absence of light or my lack of response. 

I brought you this, he says. My eyes drift to the piece of wood he’s holding out in his hand. It’s slim, dark, simple. I vaguely recognize it. It used to belong to me. 

I have no use for it, I tell him. My throat hurts. 

His eyes tell me nothing at all. He sets the wand on the table next to me. He hesitates, then turns.

Take care, Draco.

 

Sometime later I realise the sound, the one that made me double over, that made my eyes water, that sound was a laugh. A ghostly one.


	7. Chapter 7

There are ghosts in the Manor.

They curl around my throat, climb up the walls, crouch behind furniture, slide between doors.

I tell the House elves to go. I don’t offer them clothes because when I tried they mostly cried and begged me not to. There are no more Malfoys, I told them. They pointed out I was the last one. I repeated, there are no more Malfoys. I told them to look for some old relative. A Black. Someone would surely take them. 

The day they left, I burned down the Manor. 


	8. Chapter 8

My plan was to burn down with it.

But he had to ruin it.

I was standing before the gates watching the flames licking away at my home. I’m sorry, Mother. I’m sorry, Father. The ghosts clutched at my ribs, poured into my eyes, screamed inside my head, ripped at my seams. The wand trembled in my hand. I was ready. 

The elves showed up at my door, he says as preamble, his voice breaking through the ghosts moving about me. 

Of course, I think. The last of the Malfoys. The last of the Blacks, in a way. I should have known. 

You should leave, I say. 

But it’s funny that he’s here. We have a history with fire, after all. 

You’ll take good care of them, I add. More than me in any case.

This is the longest I’ve spoken in a very long while. My last words.

I turn my back on him and slip through the gates, towards the flames. The ghosts follow. The heat is like a wall before me. I am ready.

His hand is on my wrist, cold, urgent. 

Draco, he says. 

He never used to say it.


	9. Chapter 9

Me and the ghosts, we move into his house. We settle on a nice routine. We talk everyday, I never sleep alone. Me and the ghosts, I mean. They got tangled on my hair, plastered on my skin. I’d carry them everywhere if I was going anywhere. As it is, we just settle on sitting for days on his couch.

I wish I could tell you I decided to live when he saved me for the second, third time?… I lose count. But the truth is I didn’t. I didn’t decide on it. I only had my wand and his hand on mine, pulling me away again.

I can never forgive him. He knows this.


	10. Chapter 10

The elves look happy to see me. There are people in his home. Voices, smells, food. There’s a shrieking relative on the wall, too. I notice all this the same way I notice the light rising and falling past my window. I never leave the house, or the couch. He brings a Healer to check on me. I know she’s a Healer by the frown in her brow and the pad on her hands. I refuse to go to the hospital.

I’m fine here, I say. She doesn’t understand, but he does. He lets me stay so I decide to forgive him. 


	11. Chapter 11

His friends come and go. I know their faces too. They’re paler and sadder and older and still I know them. Somehow, they know mine too. They talk in low voices, put their hands on his arm, ask things that get silent nods in answer.

Another Healer comes over. A different one. She says she heals minds. I laugh.

I wish she wasn’t wasting her time, she looks like a nice enough person.


	12. Chapter 12

I think about putting an end to it everyday. But something stops me. 

It’s not something I can describe. 

He’s around me, moving like my ghosts. Maybe he’s one of them too. We don’t talk, but his silence is something to look forward. 

So I live.

Me and the ghosts and him.


	13. Chapter 13

One night I hear him cry.

The sound is human and too real. It stands out among the sounds of ghostly creatures. My legs hold me up. They move.

I find him crouching in his room, hands curled into fists, head down, shoulders shaking on a storm. His ghosts are standing at the foot of his bed. I stare at them, then move past them, closer to him. 

I really want to say something, something like his name. Like he did with me. But I can’t. I sit down, my hands acting on their own, they’re on his hair, then on his arms and then he is slumping over me, my arms around him. He cries for a very long time. 


	14. Chapter 14

The next day, I feel changed. I don’t think about what that means, I simply go down the stairs to his kitchen. I want to make something with my hands but I don’t know how. I ask the elves to teach me. They look at me in awe. They watch over me patiently as I try and fail to scramble eggs, then try and try and try again. When they deem the result satisfactory I pick up a plate and go up the stairs again. 

I watch him eat. 


	15. Chapter 15

Life is a very strange thing.

I learn to cook more than scrambled eggs. I cook all our meals with the help of the elves. They felt hurt when I told them I wanted to do it all by myself, so we do it together. He comes to the kitchen to watch us. He sits at the table and we eat together. I bake cakes. He invites his friends. I don’t talk much, but they’re always nice to me. I know they’re worried about him, but he’s gained weight in the last weeks.

He tells me I can use his library. I sit there for hours, looking at the shelves still silently standing. I remember I burned all my books. I’m unable to read a word. I never pick up a book anymore, much less open one. I can’t dream. But I like the quiet of his books.

One night, he tells me the name of every one of his ghosts. I learn them by heart. He asks about mine. My throat closes down. He says it’s okay.  

I don’t expect him to pull a blanket over us.

We start to sleep together, me and the ghosts and him.

I don’t feel alone anymore.


	16. Chapter 16

He convinces me to step out of the house one day. He has a small garden on the back. The trees look too tall, too wide, but he puts his arm around me.

I look up at the stretch of sky. A drop of water falls on my face. I haven’t felt rain on my skin since the War. We stand in the rain, and I will it to wash away my ghosts.

If words are a prayer, that’s what I do then. I pray they can be gone with the rain.

I turn my head towards him. His eyes drift to mine. They are as green as I remembered.

Green is the color of hope.


	17. Chapter 17

Harry is standing in the garden, the sun shining on his hair.

We’ve been mending, me and him, no ghosts. I didn’t leave them that day I found the color back in his eyes. But I did leave them later on.

I don’t know precisely when it happened. I can only tell you that the War is behind us, but the ones we lost are always with us. I don’t know if minds heal, but I did try to heal mine. I accepted the help I needed.

I also realised that I was needed. He needed me. As I found my place again in the world of the living, I found out he wasn’t the only one needing me. My hands could make things. My words were enough. My mistakes did not define me. There was healing in others, if I looked closely. And I did look.

I don’t know if hearts can heal. But I believe they’re patchwork.

I was surprised to find mine still working.

I was surprised that, of all the things, he wanted me.


	18. Chapter 18

Of our first kiss, you should only know this:

That he was the one to tell me he wanted to kiss me.

That I was the one moving to do it.

That he laughed in my mouth.

That I was slow and hard.

That his body was awake under me.

That he let me pull him down on the couch.

That he picked me up and took me to his bed, our bed. 

That his skin is as close to home there is to me.

That he came inside me, like I was home.

That I was the first one to speak the word love.

 

And that all of it didn’t happen on the same night. 

In fact, the night I kissed him, I cried. I babbled about my ghosts. He listened. Then he just kissed me harder.


	19. Chapter 19

There’s not an end to this story. Just a happily ever now. 

I’m happy that Harry’s is the first face I see each day of my life.

I’m happy his eyes are a proper green again.

I’m happy about the good days, and the just okay days and the bad days.

I’m happy to cook for us and our friends. 

I’m happy I can pick up a book again.

I’m happy to have a home with no ghosts. 

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos mean the world. Hope you liked it.


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